Red and Black in the ABC Cafe
by NuvolaBianca
Summary: The song ABC Cafe/Red and Black, worked into a story with modern AU setting. Warning, contains some language!


To say it was hectic madness would be the understatement of the century. It, more precisely, was a wild scurrying of people: back and forth about the café. Some brought news, others brought guns and bombs, others still were chugging down beer like it was water.

One particularly tall man among them hurried into the centre of the crowd. He did not attempt to shush the others, but rather screamed at them to get their attention- something quite out of his rather reserved character.

"YO PEOPLE! CAN YOU LOT JUST SHUT UP ONE SEC?!"

The others turned around in shock at this unexpected eruption of noise. In response, the man just surveyed the crowd with an unwavering glare and pushed his wire-framed glasses further up his nose.

"Just wanted to let y'all know that the sections have been prepared at Notre Dame."

Moment's pause when the others said absolutely nothing, apart from a shorter man that flicked his hair to one side and kissed his teeth with an air of disgust.

"Combeferre, dude, did you really have to get all up in our faces just to say that?"

The others nodded in approval and looked Combeferre up and down with narrowed eyes, which soon grew wide as an even shorter guy suddenly burst through the door of the café, his olive-green jeans almost slipping past his butt because of all the running.

The man spluttered and choked, desperate for breath. He grabbed Combeferre's arm for support and pointedly ignored the look of revulsion that flitted across the other man's face.

"Omg guys you're totally not gonna believe this." He announced dramatically. The others rolled their eyes, accustomed to the rather camp man's declarations.

"At rue de Bac, they're straining at the leash! Can you bitches even get your heads round that?! It means that we're finally gonna have us some action!."

A slim, blond figure stepped into the ring that had now formed around the panting man.

"Thanks, Feuilly, for you much needed input." He scoffed a bit too sarcastically. The others stepped back from him simultaneously, as if in a gesture of mutual respect.

"As you folks can see, the time is near. In fact, it's so near it's stirring the blood in their veins! And yet-"

His rather motivational speech was interrupted by the man named Feuilly in the olive green jeans.

"Dude, are you actually being serious? So I burst in here with some rad news, next second I'm told about 'Stirring the blood in their veins?' Since when did you turn into bloody Shakespeare? That line was so gay it might as well have come straight out of my ass!"

Some stifled laughter ran through the crowd, but ceased abruptly as soon as the blonde turned upon the smaller man with a look on his face that could have sent the whole of the National Guard running for their lives.

"Feuilly, if you interrupt me again I swear I will shove this red flag up your gay ass and send you back to where you came from!" he replied with a vague gesture towards the colossal beam of wood on which some red fabric had been attached. Feuilly took the hint.

"As I was saying, beware. Don't revel in your joy too much and get pissed on the night. Beer fear is only gonna be **one** of the side effects if I catch any of ya with your wrists surgically grafted to a bottle. And yes, Grantaire, I mean you as well."

He gave the guy called Grantaire a pointed look. Grantaire just pretended to look at texts on his iPhone to avoid the awkward eye contact.

Enjolras turned once again to his general audience, jumping onto a table so he could look at all of them at once.

"We need some sort of sign, ok? We need to round up all them people out there that will be fighting with us, to give 'em some guns and get 'em all in line, 'coz I'm sure as hell that hardly any of them are gonna be in the right shape to hold off the Guard."

Murmurs of appreciation ran through the crowd, many heads nodded in response. A loud clang, however, made 15 heads jolt up with a start. A long, slim, male figure now lay sprawled across the dusty floor of the café. In fact, the person's legs were so tangled in each other that it was hard for the others to notice that the laces of the man's red converses were all knotted together.

Enjolras tried extremely hard not to facepalm at what he could behold from his position on top of the table.

"Oh, Marius. You're late." He commented dryly. Combeferre and Feuilly could see how hard he was trying to remain serious while the rest of his company were clearly laughing their heads off.

'Marius' now struggled to his feet in humiliation, his face matching the shade of the enormous flag on the opposite end of the room. He tried to gather his brown leather satchel that had skidded about three meters away from him as soon as it had made contact with the floor, and the rest of the company could not help noticing how distant and spaced out he looked.

The short man that had previously kissed his teeth at Combeferre forcefully snatched a can of Carlsberg from Grantaire and walked towards the beetroot-faced guy.

"Marius, what the hell is up with you, man? You look like you've just had a visit from the ghost of Christmas past!"

He proceeded to toss the can of beer at the man he was talking to, who failed to catch it properly and therefore had to spastically move his arms to try and stop the can from reaching the floor. At last he was successful.

"Tip it back and tell us what you've been getting up to."

Marius tentatively sipped on the beer like a small child confronted with boiling milk. If he had whispered a 'Thanks, Joly', it surely went by unnoticed.

"Hmm… a ghost? Yeah… maybe it was a ghost… I mean, I saw here there, for like, a minute- then she just…disappeared! Maybe I imagined it, but I swear to god she was the hottest thing that's _ever _walked the face of the earth!"

This was accompanied by the usual long, drawn out, melodramatic sigh of a man fallen hopelessly in love.

Grantaire snapped out of his annoyance at having his precious alcohol taken away from him, and instead looked at Marius with a rather creepy smile on his face. It somehow made him seem even more drunk than he actually was.

"Well, well, well. Look at our lil Marius, finally in luuuuurve. I would never have expected it from you, bro. I mean, seriously? It depresses me immensely to see _**you**_ potentially getting laid while the rest of us are all getting into kicking Bourgeoisie ass at the barricades."

Enjolras shot him a look of disgust, and even though Grantaire tried desperately to hide it, his eyes flashed with something akin to hurt. Unfortunately, Grantaire had grown so accustomed to playing the clown in these kind of situations that he completely chose to ignore the slight throb in his chest. He forced a smile.

"Cos while _you_", he resumed, gesturing to their leader, "are all up in our faces about revolution, _this_ guy here", he proclaimed and pointed one ruddy finger towards Marius, "is acting like some Eighth Grade douchebag who's only just discovered this thing called **woman**."

Marius blushed furiously in response.

"It's not…like I don't care about you guys anymore…I mean they _do _say 'Bros before hoes' and all that…it's just-"

But Enjolras cut in impatiently before the boy could finish his sentence.

"Listen, if it was any other time I would actually pretend to give a shit about your love life. But it's time for us all to decide who we are. I mean, what on earth are we doing this for? Cos it damn sure isn't just for the lolz."

Here some of the Amis winced visibly. A word like 'lolz' coming out of Enjolras' mouth did not ring tastefully in the slightest.

"Ask yourselves, people" he continued unblinkingly, eyes travelling from person to person, laden with an unexpected graveness he was only able to show when he spoke passionately about something. "What's the price you might pay? Because if you're treating all this like some sort of a rich kid's game…"

The rest remained unspoken. Each of the men present seemed, at least to some extent, to understand what they had signed up for. They understood how much it meant to Enjolras, as it meant a lot for them too. Each and every one of them came for a chance to help the 'Abaisses'; those who had been laid low (except Grantaire, who just came to surreptitiously take pics and vids of his beloved leader with his iPhone while drinking free beer). So when their gang leader told them that the colours of the world were changing day by day, no-one laughed derisively. Even Feuilly kept his trap shut and listened with fervent admiration.

Enjolras stood up on the table and pointed once again to the flag propped up on the other side of the room.

"Red." He said simply.

"You see this red? Huh? You know what this means? This is **our** blood. The blood of angry men. The blood of angry men that are never going to put up with this bullshit, and aren't gonna stop until something is done about it.

He kept his standing position on the table as he gestured to the window. By now, the curtains of night had been pulled over the whole of Paris, and despite the crisp air and clear sky, not one star was to be seen.

"Black. Darkness. The dark of the times now past, the times that we strive to wipe out from the history books.

He looked down at each and every one of the people there assembled and cocked his head to the side.

"Red. A world about to dawn." Here he paused, and turned to Marius with a look that contained too many emotions to fully pin down and decipher.

"Black. The night that ends at last."

Marius squirmed uncomfortably under such close scrutiny.

"Dude, I get that and stuff, but seriously, if you were there today, you would have totally been concussed by breathless delight, just like me."

The whole company exploded. Enjolras seemed to be the only one in the room who wasn't splitting their sides laughing, or rolling on the floor for that matter. Instead, he glared at the lovestruck student with a look that just seemed to scream 'Breathless delight, my ass!'

Marius, almost on the verge of crying, met his friend's gaze and continued shakily. "Like…honestly. One look and BAM! Your whole world has changed forever. Things you thought were cool before look like the worst things ever, and shit you had never thought you would do in a million years just seems cool all of a sudden. It's the biggest Mindfuck imaginable."

It seemed that the general party had regained their overall composture, but whilst the others resigned themselves to shaking their heads ruefully at their friend, the inebriated one just couldn't resist taking the opportunity to take the piss.

He stood up on the table and ignored Enjolras' cries of protest.

"Red!" he boomed, trying to imitate Enjolras' passionate voice.

Marius couldn't resist taking the bait.

"I'm not sure if it's possible to feel 'red', but I'm pretty sure that's how my soul feels right now!"

"Black!"

"I swear that's how life's gonna be like if I don't find her again."

By now, the others just couldn't resist any longer. They all hopped onto separate tables and puffed their chests out as Enjolras facepalmed in agony. Some of them even gestured dramatically at the flag to get their point across.

"Red!" they all cried amidst bouts of giggling.

"The…colour of…like…love, or…or something? Desire? I can never remember which one…" Marius trailed off.

"Why don't we have both?!" Shouted Joly in the background.

"Black!" the crowd of young men sang once more.

"The colour of despair!" cried Marius with some welcome conviction.

"Ok, Ok people, you've had your fun and stuff, now get off those tables!" said Enjolras with a small smile on his face. He spread his legs out man-style across the table that he could now once again occupy fully. The others obeyed without hesitation.

"Marius, hear me out bro. There's no way I'm gonna treat you like some retarded 5 year old, so I'm just going to say it straight. I'm 100% certain that you mean well, but please, take a walk in my shoes. I got 99 problems at the moment, and your lonely soul certainly is** not **one of them. If we're actually trying to get somewhere in this goddam revolution, then we're gonna have to put all sides of our insignificant lives behind us. Love lives included. There's no space for love when freedom is at stake."

Feuilly kissed his teeth once again. "You only say that cos you've never come close to even _kissing_ anyone in the whole 21 years of your life!"

Grantaire honestly could have punched his face off, but remained silent to watch the reaction of the only man he held a shred of admiration for, who, in turn, remained completely impassive to that remark.

"Courfeyrac! Do you have all the ammunition we need?" he called out to receive a hearty 'yes sir!' in response.

"Good. Feuilly, Combeferre, the clock is ticking and I need much more input from the both of you."

By now, the all the men were on their feet and were moving about the café once again, trying to get everything together. Marius, somehow caught up in all the chaos, remained still and didn't move a centimetre even when confronted with another one of his friend's steely gazes.

"Yo! Grantaire! Can I trust you to PUT THAT BLOODY BOTTLE DOWN and get that lazy ass to do something productive?! Like, do we have enough guns?" Enjolras hollered out to his secret admirer who jolted awake from his alcohol-induced stupor and proceeded to scurry clumsily about the place just to look as if he was doing something.

Courfeyrac, the head of ammunition, stepped forward boldly.

"Hey, apparently in St Antoine they're with us to the man. At least we got some back up if the Guard come knocking when we're not ready for them."

Enjolras flashed him a rare smile in response. "Good stuff."

"Just to remind y'all that in Notre Dame, they're tearing up the stones!" chirped Combferre in the background. All of a sudden, 15 heads snapped towards him in annoyance.

"For God's sake Combeferre, we already got it when you screamed at us the first time!" hissed a disgruntled Jean Prouvaire, while his calmer best friend Lesgles clapped him on the shoulder lightly.

Feuilly stumbled into the centre of the café with short arms fully laden with more revolvers. "We got 20 GP-100 .357 Magnums, good as new!" he whispered breathlessly while dumping the handguns in front the awestruck company.

"Sweet!" breathed Lesgles in complete awe.

All the amis were so engrossed in staring at the weapons glinting in the light streaming in from the dusty windows that the sound of a small boy shouting at the top of his lungs almost didn't register.

"Everybody Listen!"

Joly knocked the small boy down in the process of walking back into the café, carrying something that suspiciously looked like more weaponry.

"20 rounds for every man!"

The little kid got up off his feet and dusted himself down in frustration.

"Jesus Christ people, **listen to me**!"

Jean Prouvaire popped up behind Joly, only to shout "Double that in Port St Cloud!

By now, as you can imagine, little Gavroche was getting more than a little impatient with his older brothers. His small stature didn't give him much of an advantage even if he tried to stand on a chair haphazardly strewn across the room.

"For goodness's sakes, Listen, everybody!"

Lesgles shoved his best friend aside jokingly while announcing to the whole crowd of revolutionaries that there were seven guns in St Martin.

That was probably the last straw for Gavroche.

"IN ALL THE NAME OF EVERYTHING FRENCH, CAN YOU ENORMOUS BLUNDERING IDIOTS JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME!" he screamed as loud as his small lungs allowed him too. The room immediately went quiet, and the only sound that could be heard was the sharp rattling of a beer can against the floor. All the men looked to the small boy with mouths open.

"Lamarque is dead."

The jaws of every single one of the Amis would probably have sunk to the centre of the earth if it weren't for the tables to stop them.

"W-what?" Stuttered a surprisingly awestruck Combeferre.

"Just as I said. Lamarque…is dead." Gavroche repeated with patience.

Enjolras found his voice among those who had so clearly lost theirs.

"Lamarque is dead. I guess…this means it's the time. He was the man of the people, and his death is the sign we've all been waiting for."

One by one, the company of revolutionaries hung their heads in mutual respect. Some put their hands on their hearts, others clutched their revolvers with enough force to splinter a block of wood. Even Grantaire held his beer in the air to honour the deceased.

"It may sound disrespectful, but we will organise a flash mob on his funeral, we will shout ourselves hoarse until they finally get what we're here to do! Cos when we do, they will understand that salvation is near. It's almost time, folks. We'll get out there, out in the streets and spread the message. We'll be brave. We stand for what we fight for, after all."

There wasn't need to nod, or murmur a silent 'yes'. The air was thick with unity; the unity of these men for a common cause.

"Because, I just know that they will come, one and all.

They **will** come when we call."

11


End file.
